The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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usergenerated

Chris Brogan, a social media maven, has published an article on his blog that goes into detail about his experience with the so called “Digg Effect“. Chris provides a visualization which shows the surge in traffic he received when he reached the Digg front page. What happened as a result? According to Chris, NOTHING. His RSS subscriber base didn’t increase, nor did the initial traffic to his site which is the basis for this post. Bloggers and site owners alike believe that getting on the front page of Digg is like striking gold, unfortunately this is not the case.

I’m not saying that being on the front page of Digg is a bad thing, but there is something you have to realize. The type of traffic that Digg sends is the “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” type of traffic. And while were talking about this sort of traffic, the same thing can be said for Stumbleupon, Sphinn, and Propeller. I’ve read so many blog entries that covered their own surge of traffic and the similarities between all of them are the same. No one sticks around, no one subscribes to the RSS feed, and the site that was once popular ends up returning to the shadows of the web.

A blogger or site owner should be looking to grow their reader base and that won’t happen by getting on the front page of Digg or any other major social bookmarking site. There is the argument where if you appear on these sites multiple times, there is a more likely chance of gaining quality traffic. I wouldn’t consider the digg effect to be called quality traffic, but I do think that by receiving this fly by night traffic, your building brand awareness. Your brand being your site and it’s a golden rule that REPITITIVENESS works.

The gist of what I am trying to say is to not rely on Digg, Stumbleupon or any other website to provide you with traffic. Instead, write good quality content. Good quality content does the job of so many other facets of blogging. Good quality content creates links, conversations, interactivity, spawns relationships, builds your brand and does so many other positive things for you, that if I were to write a book on SEO, it would contain one page. That one page would simply say, WRITE QUALITY CONTENT.

Tell me what you think in regards to this issue. I’d be very interested in your opinion.

BTW. Hello to all of you STUMBLING across this post. Are you here to prove me wrong?

Gamma4Xray has put together a video which provides visuals explaining how we think web 2.0 works vs how web 2.0 actually works in regards to sites such as Reddit and Digg. The video does include some nice theatrical music to go along with the graphics and at the very end, Gamma asks the question, How Can We Make Web 2.0 Give Us What We Want? I was surprised that an answer to that question wasn’t given as it’s an easy answer. The answer is RSS. At any rate, watch the video and let me know what you think.

The most popular, sometimes controversial online encyclopedia, Wikipedia has achieved another milestone today with 2 million user generated pages. The article which lays claim to the title had something to do with El Hormiguero, which detailed a Spanish Television show which went by the same name.

To lay credence to the information in Wikipedia, most of the searches I perform in Google contain at least one or two results from Wikipedia on the front page of search results. That has to stand for something. Congratulations to WikiPedia for the milestone, here’s to 2 million more pages!

Monitoring my feeds, I’ve noticed there has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding a service called WebSlides. WebSlides is brought to you by the same folks that are behind Diigo, one of many social bookmarking services that are on the net. WebSlides allows users to take their bookmarks and turn them into a slide show.

Some of the uses for this service as stated by Diigo include:

Create a guided tour for any website

Show a list of houses to real estate clients

Review a list of job candidates found online

Bundle important course resources for students

Assemble all the pages on a specific family line.

Provide guided use cases for potential customers

Share the favorite places you would like to visit with your friends and blog readers

Provide a quick briefing, a simple tutorial or guided tour on any subject.

Here is an introductory video highlighting the service and what it’s capable of.

The ideas and the possibilities, do seem endless. The service is currently in an invite-only stage of life however, I have signed up and if they provide me with an invitation, I’ll be sure to provide you with an in depth review.

Searchles, a company specialized in the social threesome (as they like to put it) is looking for someone out there who can create an excellent video ad for their company. Cavman states, they have allocated a good fund for the project, and the payout will be based on the creativity and professionalism of the ad. Are there any takers?